Stranger still, he decided to make his first entry into this public debate at a Muslim iftar in honor of Ramadan. But Obama seemed to have little understanding of the human element – why this is an objectively bad idea, even if it’s a legal one. What he said was technically correct, just a speech praising the Westboro Baptist Church’s legal right to picket military funerals with awful signs would be an accurate statement of the law. He decided, inexplicably, to give a public speech in favor of the right to build the mosque, without so much as a word suggesting the mosque is a terrible idea. First, there was Obama’s massive unforced error. But some political folks seem completely unable to grasp the notion of being able to do something you shouldn’t.
As I noted, this is the majority view within New York. Continue their wonderful apostolate, but do it elsewhere, so as not to rub salt in the wounds of the mourners.Īll of this is common-sense. As a result, John Paul II asked them to move. Yet Jewish groups were hurt by the presence, and the well-intentioned effort became a lightening rod of controversy. They mourned for the victims and prayed for their souls. Unlike the Park51 mosque, there was no question of the Carmelite’s good faith here. That message is no more anti-Islamic than it is anti-Orthodox (or any other example you want to use).Īs the Wall Street Journal notes, in the 1980s, a group of Carmelite nuns had purchased an abandoned building on the outskirts of Auschwitz, which they used to pray for the victims. Build your house of worship, but build it elsewhere.
It’s not that we don’t want the Orthodox to build churches – the opposite is true – but that we don’t want them to build churches on the site of massacres done in the name of the Orthodox faith. As Catholics, the Orthodox are dear to us, yet if there was a proposed Orthodox church being built at the site of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre (where some 8000 Muslim Bosniaks were massacred for religious and ethnic reasons), hopefully Christians of all stripes would stand with outraged Muslims in opposition to the church being built at that spot. And this is true regardless of your thoughts on Islam - indeed, many liberal Muslims agree. The entire move looks like a Muslim group gloating over an abhorrent attack on innocent civilians. Short answer: it would either blatantly violate thee Constitution, or would be obviously deceptive (a law to prevent all new construction in this area, etc.), or both.įor the second point, I don’t think I need to explain how building a massive mosque near an enormous massacre done in the name of Islam is a slap in the face to victims and humanity as a whole. Try and imagine what a law preventing this mosque from being built would look like. For the first point, banning the construction of a specific religion’s building at a particular site is about as unconstitutional a law as you could get. This is something which the majority of New Yorkers affirm. Put another way, the mosque can and may be built there, but it shouldn’t be.